Death Gets Its Due In Rampolla Exhibit

There's nothing pretty about the 24 powerful paintings in Loch Haven Art Center's ''Frank Rampolla: A Retrospective.'' But there's a lot to admire.

On two adjacent canvases, obese figures reminiscent of Renaissance Adams and Eves face each other like weary survivors of original sin. In many of Rampolla's rigidly structured works, couples thrash on sofas and carpets, their limbs entwined in agony instead of pleasure. Deathly pale forms lie on slabs in other works, their dull gray tones underlining their message of life's inevitable end.

Rampolla, a New York artist who came to Central Florida in the early 1960s, taught art at the University of South Florida in Tampa until he died of a heart attack in 1971, at age 40. As his memorable paintings at Loch Haven make clear, he was obsessed with death, destruction and decay. He was particularly concerned with the innocent victims and the murderers, numb perpetrators of that ultimate end.

Loch Haven's show was organized last spring by Dorothy Cowden, director of the Lee Scarfone Gallery at the University of Tampa. The earliest work here, ''Gli Tedeschi, 1964,'' uses the same grim subject, dripping paint, loose brushwork and large format as one of the most recent works, ''Second, 1971.'' In ''Gli Tedeschi,'' a bound woman stands beside a fleshy man who hangs by his heels from a hangman's noose. A stiffened nude lies on a mortician's table in ''Second,'' his foreshortened body jutting out from an ugly, institutional-green background wall.

In both paintings -- as in most in the Loch Haven show -- colors are limited to dark shades of gray and space is tightly compressed. Walls close in from sides and back, creating shallow stages upon which anguished characters act out pointed morality plays. As in the two untitled portraits from 1971 -- the modern Adam and Eve -- sin and the shame that follows it were Rampolla's primary topics. But they were not his only ones. Like many artists during the mid- to late-1960s, he also was concerned with the war in Southeast Asia.

Body parts and amputees fill the oppressively cramped space in the three canvases of ''In Memoriam.'' Created later, and more ambitious than the similar ''Vietnam Figure IV'' and ''Vietnam Figure V,'' the ''Memorial'' triptych presents figures that are either paralyzed with pain or frozen in death. Like screaming figures sketched by British painter Francis Bacon in sheer veils of pigments, the distorted features in Rampolla's works show the suffering that comes more from existential angst than from physical problems. As dark in mood as paintings by the 18th-century Spanish artist Goya and as concerned with carnal sensation as the 20th-century American artist Chaim Soutine or the German Max Beckmann, Rampolla's works are the emotional heirs of a long tradition of highly personal expressionism. Surprisingly, however, his most typical -- the monochromatic Vietnam studies and untitled tortures -- are less effective than the few that use strong colors and emphatic patterns. It's a shock to turn from a grisaille nightmare of bound figures to the lurid ''Two Figures on a Couch, 1971,'' but it's a wonderful shock that amounts to an unforgettable aesthetic jolt. Suddenly, instead of the thin pigments and agitated, loose brushwork that characterize most works here, the viewer is confronted with vibrant pastels. The blurred, warmly pink bodies of two nudes in motion set up a sharp contrast to the prim lines of the striped, Empire-style sofa that is crammed into a claustrophobic alcove.

The disorienting gap between the agony of the two subjects and the cheerful, springlike colors in ''Two Figures'' creates a deceptively charming effect that ultimately makes the small painting more chilling than any other work here. Nonetheless, like the show's other 23 works, its brilliant subject and style make ''Two Figures'' irresistibly fascinating.

The summer exhibit of works by members of Focus and Creative Art galleries is pleasant, if unremarkable. The quality of the works is consistently high, but the main attractions of the combined show at Creative Art Gallery are its wide ranges of style and subject.

A monochromatic, well-crafted basket by Anne Meier of Longwood hangs near a beautifully toned photographic still life by Jane Plante of Altamonte Springs. The basket's functional aspect and undyed, natural materials stand in sharp contrast to Plante's colorful, refined piece.

Similarly, two misty color photographs by Nancy Greenlee of Orlando that are mounted together in a single frame express a unique point of view. Her ''Double Vision'' brings together two images, a boy blindfolded with a gauzy bandage and a woman walking inland from the sea, dressed in a loose white dress made of a fabric similar to the blindfold.